Was watching History special on 2012. So Now i am wondering, if lets say an individual with finite resources deccided to preserve lots and lots of data about todays world, what would be the best way to do so? Carving things in stone seems to be a prooven method by multi thousand year history, but clearly its not possible to carve everything about todays world in stone. Digital media? Probably not a chgance...

Lets assume that we can preserve the "hardware" instact, sealed in a safe, not affected by floods, earthquakes etc. CDs/DVDs would be useless without a computer to read them 1000 years in the furure, even if they survived. A computer saved with cd/dvd package would probably have its HD demagnitized, so beings of 3012 will not be able to boot up MS Windows anyways, to load in what ever data which may still be of DVD/CD archive. Even boot cd would fail b/c of demagnetized bios chip.

So, question becomes: Short of carving a million stone tablets, how should humanity preserve todays knowledge for future beings.

Lets assume the archive that we ar discussing is lost, but physically intact for 1,000 years.
Clarification added 1 day ago:

Wanted to clarify based on 1 reply I got so far.
1) I dont think its safe to assume that beings in year 3000 will be as smart as us. Afterall if wile is nearly wiped out and people revert to basic farming, they might not reinvent a computer, less likely a method to analyze a carbon chrystal within 1000 years.
2) I am curios to see if current technology can offer means to store the data. Afterall something as crude as rocks and stone tablets seemed to work in the bast....
Clarification added 23 hours ago:

Got few interesting ideas so far. Something else to consider is the wealth of knowledge that is avaiable in todays world. For example ENDF library, a library of nuclear data files used for calculations of particle transport is about 1.5GB in its most condenced form. Can you imagine how many stone tablets that would require to strore for future generations? NASA's earth imagry dataset is close to 30TB if not more by now, is it even possible to store something like that for earthlings in 3012?
Clarification added 23 hours ago:

ROM sounds interesting. I wonder what would life expectancy of PROM be? Assuming it is safely stored ofcourse. One thousand years is a very long time, there is not a single micro device that survived that long so far. An experiment where gold and lead lates were fused together over 5 year interval comes to mind, only diffusion was responsible for such fusing. I wonder if any circuitry whos size measures in nanometers has any chance to survive 1000 years?
Clarification added 14 hours ago:

A little calculation I did about 2 minutes ago:
1 fully tuped page in size 12 Times New Roma font has about 7,000 characters. This is roughly 7kB of data. CEO of Google, read here: http://www.wisegeek.com/how-big-is-the-internet.htm estimates that total size of the internet is 5 million terabytes. To simplyfy the calculations, lets assume 7 million terabytes, since it is still growing. So to print all the data in the internet it would require 1000 million million sheets of paper. 1000 sheets usually sstack up close to 2 inches high. So we would need a volume of 2x8x11x1,000,000x1,000,000 cubic inches to store all that paper. According to wikipedia earth is 1.0832073 × 10^12 km3 in volume. Transforming the volume require to store our printed paper into KM^3 we get 2.88412 KM^3.

Seems like there is plenty room on earth left to spare. Should we start printing?

Igor,

The flaw is in thinking that one single technology (rocks or other) can be deployed at single point of time and last for a 1,000 years or more.

While there have been real world examples, some which you mentioned (stone carvings) their longevity was probably more accidental than planned, maybe.

Nonetheless, the answer or at least "an answer" is a continual "process" that takes into account an evolution of technologies as time and innovation moves forward and the forethought to plan ahead for the eventual movement of data, and all that entails over and over again.

Data, electronic or otherwise has to be prepared from the onset to be migrated from technological compute and storage platform number one to technological compute and storage platform number two.

While it is as rest, it must be continually checked for readability and accessibility; physical media shelf life must be aligned with software end of life supportability.

Data must also be protected and made resilient, replicated copies that span continents, durable offline copies stored in "Iron Mountains", or underground vaults such as the seedbank in Norway.

Choosing the most appropriate media or "vault" underground and frozen or circling the planets in lunar orbit, choosing the most correct media is critical to its planned successful longevity.

Lastly, the practice to “archive” has to be treated not as a sub-sector of Information Technology as we know it today. The group that is storing things forever, cannot be part of the Operations Group that’s responsible for Backup, DR and Business Continuity.

Recognize that the storing of a country’s public and academic works, it’s most prized and cherished photos, etc. or seeds needed to replenish the earth’s life giving plants is not an organizational peer of the Backup and DR groups.

A team that delivers “archive” services is a distinct group that requires a different organizational structure than what you typically find today. This is why countries often engage academia to assist them with their needs to archive their public works.

Today, the electronic viability of storing massive amounts of data more cost effectively in smaller foot prints across n-tired flavors of storage has delivered the verb archiving back into the IT realm. It’s likely to stay there for awhile, however the practice of “archive” noun, needs to be distinct in its application and practice – and then 1,000 years is possible – it’s a combination of people, process and technology, perhaps a few cave etchings and golden plates thrown in for good measure.

Good Luck,
Peter

Links:

* http://www.csi1000.com
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault